The personal blog of Julie R. Enszer, a poet, writer, and lesbian activist. Covering a variety of topics but especially contemporary poetry, LGBT activism, and queer analysis. For more information about her work visit, www.JulieREnszer.com

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Poetry by Marcia Nardi

I HAVE LET MYSELF BE PROVED

I have joined you, my love,In abandoning me

In love that is not loveI have set myself freeBut not from youOnly from me

I have let myself be provedIn love without loveNeither rib nor tree

Do you feel me near?Or have I belowLeft with my limbs under the snowThat contact of earth with the skyThe heart forgoes?

Do you feel me closeAs a star to a star?Do you feel me as near, Love,

And as far?

I have joined you In abandoning me.

By Marcia Nardi

As I’ve written earlier, Marcia Nardi was a correspondent of William Carlos Williams from 1942 until 1956 – with sporadic correspondence between the two of them. The extant correspondence are gathered by Elizabeth Murrie O’Neil in The Last Word: Letters between Marcia Nardi & William Carlos Williams, published by the University of Iowa Press in 1994.

Marcia Nardi was born in Boston, MA on August 6, 1901 with the name Lillian Massell. She attended Wellesley College from 1919 through 1921 and left during her junior year before graduating. She then moved to Greenwich Village and lived at one time in the same rooming house as Allen Tate and Hart Crane. Nardi seems to be writing regularly and publishing between 1924 and 1929. She works for the Modern Quarterly in Baltimore for a short time and has three poems published in the journal. She also has poems published in Measure, Bookman, the Nation, and the New York Times. She writes reviews including a review of H.D. Heliodora. Her son, Paul, is born on October 23, 1926. She never divulges the name of her son’s father. Throughout the entire Great Depression, Nardi works a variety of jobs in New York City to support herself and her son.

As a result of a medical issue with Paul, Nardi meets William Carlos Williams through a connection established by Nardi’s neighbor, Harvey Breit. This commences their correspondence and friendship. Williams provided professional assistance for Paul and also corresponded with Nardi and tried to aid her in making literary connections. As a result of Williams, seventeen of Nardi’s poems were published in New Directions Number Seven anthology. Shortly after their initial meeting – and Nardi granting Williams permission to use one of her earlier letters in Paterson, the two lost contact.

Nardi writes to Williams next in 1949 after seeing Paterson I and II at a local bookstore near Woodstock, New York, where she is living with her husband, Charles John Lang, a writer and painter. Nardi and Williams correspond sporadically between 1949 and 1956. At various times, Williams sends Nardi money and provides some assistance to her in making literary connections. One of the final things he does is serve as a reference for her for a Guggenheim fellowship, which is awarded to her in the spring of 1957. Nardi lives near Woodstock with Lang until 1950 when she leaves him and goes New York. For the next two decades, Nardi publishes her poems in a variety of places – and using different names – including Ladies Home Journal, Poetry, American Scholar, and The New Yorker. Her full-length collection is published in 1956.

In her letters to Willliams, Nardi wrote extensively about both her social and literary isolation – and even beyond the excerpts of her letters included in Paterson wrote eloquently about her plight as a woman artist. She lived often in abject poverty, for many years struggling to support herself and her son. She died on March 13, 1990 in Watertown, MA.

Williams used a portion of a letter from Nardi early in the first book of Paterson. Here it is in its entirety:

In regard to the poems I left with you; will you be so kind as to return them to me at my new address? And without bothering to comment upon them if you should find that embarrassing—for it was the human situation and not the literary one that motivated my phone call and visit.Besides, I know myself to be more the woman than the poet; and to concern myself less with the publishers of poetry than with . . . living . . .But they set up an investigation . . . and my doors are bolted forever (I hope forever) against all public welfare workers, professional do-gooders and the like.

This letter was heavily edited by Williams, as was his practice in the early parts of Paterson.

As Nardi’s correspondence with Williams continued, however, and the sequence of Paterson continued, Williams used longer passages from letters as a part of the text. The conclusion of the second book of William Carlos Williams’ Paterson is a five-page letter from Marcia Nardi to Williams. This is the beginning of the letter:

My attitude toward woman’s wretched position in society and my ideas about all the changes necessary there, were interesting to you, weren’t they, in so far as they made for literature? That my particular emotional orientation, in wrenching myself free from patterened standardized feminine feelings, enabled me to do some passably good work with poetry—all that was fine, wasn’t it—something for you to sit up and take notice of! And you saw in one of my first letters to you (the one you had wanted to make use of, then, in the Introduction to your Paterson) an indication that my thoughts were to be taken seriously because they too could be turned by you into literature, as something disconnected from life. But when my actual personal life crept in, stamped all over with the very same attitudes and sensibilities and preoccupations that you found quite admirable as literature—that was an entirely different matter, wasn’t it? No longer admirable, but, on the contrary, deplorable, annoying, stupid, or in some other way unpardonable; because those very ideas and feelings which make one a writer with some kind of vision, are often the very same ones which, in living itself, make one clumsy, awkward, absurd, ungrateful, confidential where most people are reticient and reticent where one should be confidential, and which cause one, all too often, to step on the toes of other people’s sensitive egos as a result of one’s stumbling earnestness or honesty carried too far. And that they are the very same ones—that’s important, something to be remembered at all times, especially by writers like yourself who are so sheltered from life in the raw by the glass-walled conditions of their own safe lives. Only my writing (when I write) is myself: only that is the real me in any essential way. Not because I bring to literature and to life two different inconsistent sets of values, as you do. No, I don’t do that; and I feel that when anyone does do it, literatures is into just so much intellectual excrement fit for the same stinking hole as any other kind.

After reading the sections of Nardi’s letters in Paterson and then the complete letters in O’Neill’s books, I was eager to read Nardi’s poems. There are twenty-two poems published in her collection from 1956. They are powerful poems individually and as a collection. The book does not include all of her published poems prior to 1956. Most notably, her long poem In the Asylum, which first was published in Botteghe Oscure in 1950, is absent with only two parts reprinted in the book.

Nardi writes powerfully about class in ways congruent with other women writers I’ve read, particularly in the Nekola and Rabinowitz anthology, Writing Red: An anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940. Her poetry also reminded me thematically of Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed – and there is another novel from the 1930s that I can’t recall, but has a fierce scene where the protagonist cuts off all of her pubic hair and mails it to her ex-lover in anger and then goes, I think, to Cuba to work for the revolution. I think Nardi’s anger in her poems is expressed in profoundly beautiful and constructive ways. I wasn’t anticipating that from reading the letters, which are simply more angry and direct and not as processed as her poems. In these ways, I think of Nardi’s book, even though it was published in the 1950s as more rooted in work from the 30s. This may simply be that I have more in my knowledge reference bank in that era however than in the 1950s.

I’ve included four additional poems below from her book. I was delighted by these ones in particular for both her content choices and the way that she uses images and metaphor.

And now you are all going abroadYou to Saint Jean de LuzAnd to Fontainebleau you and Menton,And you with the numerous friends thereTo Italy’s many sunsNow the autumn has comeWhile I here at homeMust go down with the chipmunk to the holeThat is there again this yearIn the native land of my flesh-and-bone.

You will send me postcardsOf the Louvre and ColoseumIf I should send you oneYou would say “Come,My cousins can put you upMy aunt has extra rooms—You are not Tom Thumb.”

But the place where I shall winter Here at homeIs not so small at allWhen you consider how small my soul has becomeMeasured beside this new griefThis little low moan just born

Which is only littleAnd only lowWhen I think of the Prado’s ceilingsAs St. Peter’s over you,But very big really. . . .too spacious really for keeping warm,

When you think of the size of the chipmunkAnd the size of my soulAnd alsoOf the size of the moleWho could do with a tinier niche than the oneThat will house me again this year, the mind’s paths gone,Here in that dark country where the same thrustMakes no different burrowWhether love’s or lust’s.

COUNTRY LETTER

I write to you from the country—Though the pavements have followed me hereAnd the florists stand by for the roseIf the winds of a few weeks agoHad slipped through these hillsHad cut straight throughThem sidewaysSlicing them off slicing awayMy breasts like their ache you I could come home to myself at leastTo my sister griefTo the arms of Dido alive againIn the mirror of my painIf not to you, my love, if not to you.

But faith, I know,My faith of a year agoWhen you absence not yet was real to my veinsSaw this land through Those days when the March winds blewThe last armor away of the heart’s protective snowAnd these valleys nowGray still and leaflessEven toda in April—theseAre the vowels . . . the vowel soundsIn the words with the deep soft “u,”The words with the vulva—deep as it—And the feminine armpits shaved and smoothLike “love,” my Love,And the word tabooedAnd waiting—as only women wait—For God, in creating the world, to use.

In their prayer for greennessI’d say that Heloise and her letters were hereAnd she who died in Portugal,But too hopeful for prayerThese valleys and these hills.

I write to you from this countryBut when I touch—in exile from your touch—A shrub or treeAnd sink my naked feet into the thawed-out fieldsMy hand to my hand is China far awayAnd to my heart my heart an ice-locked sea And always the prison matron’s watchful eyeGoes with us to the bathing roomsAnd haunts the darkness as we climbInto our separate beds at night to sleep.

Not only my life is lost and betrayedBut my death alsoLike that of mummiesOr those who in cities seeFrom a hospital windowEven their Potter’s Field filled in with bricks—The pavements have followed me hereBut I write to you from the country.

HOW THE RICH MOVE SOFTLY

How the rich move softlyThrough their injustices,Softly as the uncut grasses on summer noons they move—That tinkle? It’s their cocktail glasses,That sound of hatchet blows?I do not know,For all is intersticesAnd open meadowland and willow lacesTo their very gentle wickednessesThat knuckleless as summer breezes go.

So softly move the rich through their injustices,Not softer is the breathing of a rose—That tinkle’s not the sound of glasses?It’s the bells then that the poorMust sprout like antlers when too nearThey venture to a rich man’s loaves.Those other sounds? That thump and clatterAs of a crutch on rugless stairs, and wooden shoes?Those are the sins of the poorAgainst the poorer still—The rich’s treat on moss with velvet soles,

And when the rich stretch out their armsTo grab and stab and kill,You need not leave the tenement wallsNor the asphalt walks to knowHow easefully the purple houndsThat the delicate cream-puff clouds unlooseDo their dark hunting of the hillside’s green—So softly moveThe rich through their injustices,From Cairo to TuckahoeThe jostling of daisies they carryAnd the drift, on the white fields, of snowThat cover up and make so beautiful the cruelty Of life from destruction deep below.

LOVE I MAKE IT BECAUSE I WRITE IT

It does not stay in the heartIt does not stay in the mind(Ah, if it did, though. . . if . . . )And when, the doors open and chafing against Its narrow confines, forth it sets.Oh what on those oceans where the clamorous fleshKnows not the captain from the ship,A lord still shall keep it. . .The love untold and denied?And what in the jungle of the thighs,To the tiger, still a prince?Love I make it because I write itAnd as I say my darling again from the skiesAthena alights at Odysseus’s side.

Back on my book-shelves a hundred books of poemsTell how the telling more than the knowingHelpless as roses left the monstersAnd all the enchanters dismayedAnd quelled the waves, and saved,While the glances thrown meDown on the streets of my lonely rovingChange the storyTo how on the tongues with a relish onlyFor the wine and honey a dollar buysThe word has diedThat leaves with no crown and no shield and homeless and thronelessThe trapped Ulysses-cry.

These lines I recall now:“I am a woman, tell me lies,”But where the caves are and those treacherous islesAnd the cord of the gathered winds is untied,The thrust is the same . . . . snatch the name,And love I make it because I write it—To find, as I say my darling,The wax for the oarsmen again suppliedAnd the burning stick for the Cyclops-eye.